Music man

There is a cliché that people in major record companies know knothing about music and care less. Well, in the case of Dave Pennefather, the stereotype just doesn’t fit.

Pennefather has been steeeped in music for over 40 years. Now at the pinnacle of the game in Ireland, as MD of Universal Music here he has guided the operation through its most successful period ever, claiming the No.1 record company slot as their own over the past two years.
He began his music career as a drummer during the high tide of the ‘60s beat scene, featuring in a number of Dublin bands, including The Kult – where he starred alongside the great Paul Brady, whose Hard Station is Dave’s all-time favurite album – and The Greenbeats. As the beat scene disintegrated, he slipped over into the showband milieu, and was the sticksman on ‘Quick Joey Small’, a No.1 hit for The Real McCoy – who became one of the biggest bands in Ireland for a period. He also did a stint – best forgotten, perhaps! – with Shay Healy in a comedy pop outfit called Rubbish.
It’s not surprising that he dabbled in comedy. Pennefather is a renowned prankster and funny man – and the reputation is well deserved. The stories of his exploits are legion, many of them too salacious to print in a family magazine like Hot Press.
“Dave was working down in the Release building in Lombard St.,” one industry insider reveals. “Donie Cassidy had an office there as well and whatever was going on, he told Pennefather that he’d never catch him out with one of his wind-ups. So Dave went straight down to his room and called Donie’s office. ‘This is Larry Waltberg of Orion Records in Nashville,’ he said, ‘and we’re doing a comp-i-lation on the music of Texas. I believe that you represent an artist by the name of T.R.Dallas, is that right?’ And he went on in that vein.
“Fifteen minutes later, Donie was out of his office telling everyone in the building about the deal he was doing with Orion Records in Nashville and the album that T.R.Dallas was making. It was priceless. But Pennefather could carry that sort of stunt off like no one else!”
Then there was the time Dave promised to take a somewhat sceptical Steve Kutner and Lucien Grainge of Universal in London to meet George Graham after an Arsenal home game at Highbury. Dave had met Graham – not at all the dour individual people might assume – on a footballing holiday in Spain and kept in contact, so he quickly spotted the opportunity for a prank. Lucien Grainge had to drop someone to Heathrow after the game and arrived back to be escorted to the Arsenal manager’s office. He knocked on the door. “Come in and keep quiet,” Pennefather boomed, “I’m talking.”
Inside, Lucien was confronted with the vista of Pennefather – who had set it up with the Scot beforehand – with his Size 10s up on the manager’s desk, lecturing him about how to improve Arsenal’s fortunes on the pitch. “You’ve got to get rid of Rocastle,” he instructed, “and bring in Gascoigne. But, more important, you’ve got to change that whole structure that you have around the academy side and bring more players through. I told you this before, for fuck’s sake, and you haven’t done it. Just do it.”
The story goes that Graham played it like a trooper. “Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right,” he nodded, like a trainee at the feet of the master, “I think I will have to set that in motion.”
It was, as they say, one of those moments!

Throughout his career, Pennefather has had an exceptional feel for what works in Ireland. He was central to the success here of Chris Rea and Nanci Griffith and was also heavily involved in breaking Garth Brooks in the UK. His own tastes are unapologetically mainstream – it’s all about entertainment, he insists – but as Universal MD he has presided over the phenomenal Irish success of acts as diverse as Eminem, Shania Twain, Scissor Sisters, Snow Patrol and, earlier this year, Bell X1. More recently, he has signed both The Blizzards and the ballad group Monto to the label – confirming that he’s willing to take risks, following his A&R hunches.
“The thing is that everyone likes Dave,” says Ossie Kilkenny, an old friend from the beat group days. “He’s great with people, which is why he’s been as effective as he has been. And he loves music. It’s his life. Apart from golf, of course, at which he is absolutely crap!”
Dave Pennefather, this is your life…

What was it that turned you on to music?

What really turned me on to music was probably George Murray’s record stores. On Saturday mornings, I used to go on an expedition to Ormond Quay with my mates in school, Pete and Bill. And George and Brendan Murray were in there and eventually George got to know what I liked. So he’d just say, ‘Take that album and if you don’t like it, bring it back’. I never brought an album back. And a lot the stuff down there is what we’d call imports today. Unusual things like Dion Di Mucci – he had been with Dion and the Belmonts. He was fantastic. George said, ‘Here, try that one. You’ll probably like that’. The same with Randy Newman, the first album.
You got involved in bands.

I just started playing drums. I was still at school. And that, then, led on to be able to play around with some local bands, you know, the oul tennis clubs and that sort of carry on.
Which was the best of the bands that you playued with?

Probably The Cult with Paul Brady, Pete Williams, myself and Jackie Macaulay from Belfast, who was probably one of the 72 who played in Them. Macaulay’s brother was one of the original members of Them, so on that basis we figured Jackie must be brilliant. But The Cult was a really, really good band.
Playing what sort of music?

R&B. Brady was this little upstart from Strabane who couldn’t stop playing – even in between tunes Brady was always hammering out riffs or whatever. Most annoying (laughs). With his little Fender Mustang. It was a good band.
Where was the scene like at the time?

There was a great feeling of belonging to a group of people when you were playing in bands. Everybody knew each other. There was no animosity. It was all everybody having a go. There were a lot of gigs around as well, so there was plenty of work. You had places like the Five Club which opened up in town, followed by the other clubs then that opened up, The River, etc. So as well as the tennis clubs and parish halls and the Stella Ballroom, all of these places were great breeding grounds for bands.
And what do you think of from that era as the great lost band, the one that should have been contenders?

There were a bunch of them – The Chosen Few with Mick Molloy and Deke O’Brien were first-class. Bluesville were a great band. There was any number of them that could have held their own. But at that stage there was no infrastructure to enable you to get any real attention. Skid Row with Brush and Gary Moore nearly did it. They had the deal with CBS. I don’t ultimately know what went wrong there. But they were all good bands. Philo was around at the time as well. So there was loads going on. Everybody would meet each other. The Manhattan at Kelly’s Corner was a great hang-out after gigs. You’d go up there for breakfast and a bottle of house white.

You also ended up doing the showband thing.

The group was disintegrating at the time because we made a record – John Paul Jones produced three tracks that we did down in Eamon Andrews Studios and they were good, but they didn’t get us anywhere. So there was a bit of disillusionment, I suppose. A change of scenery was required. So everybody was trying out different things and playing with different people. I ended up with Earl Gill.
Who had a kind of orchestra?

The Earl Gill Orchestra, based mainly in the Shelbourne Hotel. My tastes were such that I wanted to try and play everything. I went in with them for about a year and it was a sensational learning curve. Earl had a wonderful ability to know musically what people wanted. He wasn’t there to educate. I learned then – and it’s something that I’ve stuck by – that in music there’s education and there’s entertainment. And the one that people really want is entertainment. So, with Earl, I learned which buttons to hit in terms of appealing to the greater number of people.
You also played with The Greenbeats.

The Greenbeats had expanded from being a group into a six-piece, seven-piece band. Now I wouldn’t call them a showband, but they probably were a showband, and they were playing good music. There were great players in there. John Keogh was one of the great losses to the industry as a performer. He was amazing. He was so exuberant and so broad in what he could do. It wasn’t a restrictive band insofar as everything was thrown in. Then we had the radio show as well on RTE which we used to record every week – Not So Green – which was a kind of a satirical programme with music and sketches and that kind of stuff. That was wonderful fun as well. I’d say if we listened to it now, we’d cringe. But at the time it was brilliant.
The Real McCoy were the biggest band you played with.

Well, the Green Beats spent a couple of years on the road and then morphed into the Real McCoy with Mick O’Brien, Dave Cody, Liam McKenna, Kevin McAlee. Kevin went on to play with Barclay James Harvest after the Real McCoy. Liam O’Sullivan on sax and John Sullivan on trumpet – good line-up, great band.
And the Real McCoy had hits.

Oh, we had big hits, like ‘Quick Joey Small’, ‘Round The Gum Tree’, ‘Ivan Had A Lover’, and when Tina joined us later on. We were drawing huge crowds around the country. We would have been in the same territory musically as The Plattermen or The Freshmen or a couple of the younger bands then from town. We were more open to playing younger music, if you like.
What about the battle for the No.1 spot?

It’s a hoot when you think about it now, because we only had one radio station and that wasn’t a pop station, that was Radio Eireann. I was working with Mike Murphy in Radio Publicity down in George’s Street. Radio Publicity was a company set up to make sponsored radio programmes and I was Mike’s runner there. So whenever a programme was made, it was my job to get the tapes and get them from the studio down to the radio station. And Mike being Mike, it was always last minute stuff. There were times you’d run into Radio Eireann in Henry Street and I’d get the bollocking because everything was late. You know, ‘This is on in an hour’s time and it should have been here yesterday’. So with the Real McCoy, there was no-one plugging the records, so I said I’d do it. So I went in and worked the radio stations and I did very well in the radio stations because of the contact base which then evolved a couple of years later into doing what I was doing with Hawk Records with Brian Molloy and Tom Costello. It was just an extension of what I had been doing with the band who were managed by them.
What about the fact that era is famous for the fact that all sorts of records were hyped to get into the charts?

We were making records that were being bought. I remember when we released ‘Quick Joey Small’, over a two-day period it sold 13,000 copies, which, if I had that today, now, I would be delighted with any single that does that. ‘Ivan’ was big, ‘Round The Gum Tree’. But there are great stories about rivers full of records down in Mayo, etc. etc. Louis (Walsh)would be able to give you much better insight into that.
What was the most infamous one that you were aware of?

I think they were all infamous. There were some absolute shite records made. I remember Tony Boland had a label at the time and he did this showband record by some obscure showband act in Cavan or Monaghan. And it was ‘Drive Safely On The Roads’. And the record actually came out with this ghastly bit of monologue in the middle with a Cavan accent, telling you to ‘drive safely on the road’ and the tape actually speeded up during the monologue on the record. How it got through quality control to this day I don’t know. I would give my eye tooth to have a copy of that record. It was so bad, it was brilliant.
I imagine there’s lots of stories about Cavan…

There’s a famous one about the Pacific Showband who had come back from Canada. We were doing the same trips as well, playing Canada and parts of North America, Chicago and New York. This was a fantastic adventure – and we were getting paid for it with a return ticket in your pocket! But the Pacifics went out there and they became a really good musicians’ band. And they arrived up at the sports centre in Cavan which was just a big gymnasium, like all the other ballrooms. And they were playing away and Steve the roadie was standing at the back with eyes closed, and he went up to the guy who owned the place. Now, the Pacific would be really trying to impress and playing cool music. And he went up and said ‘What do you think of the band? Are they not the best?’ And the promoter is reported to have said, ‘Well, now, have you ever heard of the Silver Pennies from Monaghan?’ ‘No,’ says he. ‘I haven’t heard of them’. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘the Silver Pennies from Monaghan are probably the worst fucking band in Ireland – and your lot are the second worst!’ So, there were a zillion stories like that.
There was a lot of yarns about bands meeting on the road in the dead of night.
And the egg battles and all that shit? You know, you’d be driving along and suddenly another band would be overtaking you, and a more successful band would probably have the big Mercedes, but as you were driving along, you’d suddenly find as they’d pass you an absolute barrage of eggs would end up on your windscreen, where they’d just pegged the eggs out. There was a lot of that. There was the time we got barred from Drogheda. We were driving back and a bunch of bands were parked in a garage forecourt where they sold hamburgers just outside Drogheda. Just for the craic, we pulled up a ways away and we sneaked around and took off everything and ran up to the counter and said, ‘Give us a couple of hamburgers’. We didn’t realise there were other cars parked behind the bus. This was four, five in the morning. The punters screamed and rang the police and all sorts of stuff. The other bands thought this was priceless. But we were barred from Drogheda. We never played Drogheda again! That was in the latter days of the Greenbeats.
The lads from Cork, they were a mad bunch of bastards.
Joe Mac and The Dixies? Yeah. Lunatics! Most of them were. You’ve got to remember, the roads weren’t like they are now. So you could be sitting in the minibus for six hours going from venue to venue. So you’d do anything at all to relieve the tediousness of the whole thing – particularly in winter it was excruciatingly boring because you’d get into the car at 3 o’clock, it was dark an hour later and you were back again at six or seven in the morning and it was still dark. I’ve played Clifden I don’t know how many times and Roundstone and all that area, but I’ve never seen it. Never. I hadn’t a clue what the places were like. Then I went down and found they were absolutely magnificent. West Cork and Dingle and Kerry and places down around there that we played were magnificent places, but I had no idea – I’d never seen them in daylight.
I remember watching a clip of a thing and the cash flowing in and the band being paid…
Some of the country bands weren’t that democratic and they’d have guys on wages with different structures of payment. So whoever it was that was charged with the responsibility of getting the roadies had to go down behind the bandwagon and call the lads in one at a time. You know, here’s yours, make sure the others don’t know, etc. etc. It was a cash business. There was plenty of that going on. Tom Costello had a bunch of bands and there was one story of the roadie who was really determined to be hip and cool and he was roadying for Johnny McEvoy. After the gig he went down to the promoter’s office and said, ‘Right, can you give me the bread, we’re going to head on now.’ So he gives him the packet to bring back to the office. He brought it back to the office and the next day he arrived in, Costello opened it and it was the sandwiches from the night before. The promoter had given him the sandwiches for after the gig…. That was a gem. It actually did happen.
What about the ballrooms and the condition of the places?

Appalling. They were block buildings with a bit of paint daubed on and the changing facilities were dire. You were lucky if there was a toilet there. If there wasn’t, there were a lot of filled mineral bottles left over from the last visitors still in them when you went in. But you didn’t care. At that stage you were just having a ball. A stay-over somewhere was always welcome. And it was great crack. There were some great characters. Keith Donald was a great character on the road in those days. He was a lunatic in a great way. We were all just single blokes having a ball.
What about the groupies?

Nothing to the extent that they have been exaggerated to, I think. But there were always girls there, same as it is today, who want to get to know the band better, he said diplomatically.
There were a couple of moments when people thought someone might break out of Ireland.

Well Joe Dolan did it and I think he was the only one. There were shows going on in England at the time like Sunday Night At The London Palladium and the variety shows were a great vehicle for the bands. They had huge followings in England – in the likes of Cricklewood or Kilburn, any of those big ballrooms there, they’d be pulling in three or four thousand Irish a night. Even on quiet nights they’d have, you know, 1,000 people, just hanging on to the vestiges of what it was to be from Ireland. So they had big followings in the UK and I think people recognised that in TV over there, that an Irish showband was always going to get an amount of viewership. So, they had a chance. But Dolan did it with ‘Make Me An Island’ which was a big, big hit. And, of course, everybody figured then that we’d all do it. We had Peter Lee Stirling, a producer from Birmingham, coming over but he went off then and suddenly became Daniel Boone and had a whole bunch of hits himself. But he was good. He brought different recording techniques into it. If you listen to some of the records now, they’re not as bad as we thought they were at the time.
At that stage, the attitude in the UK was probably that these was just a bunch of Paddys…..

Yeah, there was the great story of Oliver Barry and Jim Hand going into Brian Epstein’s office and saying they’d like The Beatles for a tent in Dundalk. ‘Now the punters will be dancing and would the boys mind?’ It was all the boys this, and the boys that. They were meant to be shagged out of the office. But it was a complete wind-up. And then a lot of bands from the UK, The Tremeloes and the likes, were making great money coming over here and touring for the same guys who were putting the showband trips together.
You worked for a while with Hawk Records and then Spider?

Hawk Records had Johnny McEvoy and the Cotton Mill Boys. And a good roster of Irish showbands, or whatever you’d like to call them. And then I had a chat with Tommy Hayden and said, ‘We want to try and get a good pop label going here’. And there was Tommy Hayden, Tony Byrne and Louis Walsh in an office in Pembroke Road, booking all sorts of acts. And we tried to create a pop label. Now Irish pop wasn’t selling that well at that stage. Some things never change. It’s still difficult today to break anything that’s Irish pop. But the idea for the label was great. We were bringing producers in from the UK and making very good quality records. And then we had Johnny Logan’s, ‘What’s Another Year’, signed to the label.
That was a mess, wasn’t it? Jim Hand had signed him …

No, Jim never signed. But claimed that he had him signed on a napkin which we always felt was a bit of hocus-pocus. It was typical Irish. While he was working under the umbrella of the Tommy Hayden Agency, Louis was the manager, but once all the success came, Tommy suddenly became the manager. On the morning after Johnny won with ‘What’s Another Year?’ – it was huge at the time, the whole Eurovision thing – and there were these hundreds of press lads and I had to get up with these three managers and try and invent what each of them did, so that if they had any questions for the managers they could ask any of these three guys. And Logan was sitting in the middle oblivious to it all. Louis and Logan were on the most almighty high that you could imagine. And he also had some kind of a deal with Release Records over here, so we they were trying to produce a contract that Logan signed years ago. So we had to license the track to Release Records and we then licensed it to CBS in the UK. It was a good deal with CBS but there were so many people then involved and everybody wanted a piece of Logan. And Louis and myself really went out with him to do all the TV and promo etc.
That must have been a hell of a gig.

We spent about six, seven, eight months on the road with Logan right across Europe and probably had the best education we ever had in that one year because, with all the trouble that was going on back here, at the slightest hint of any abnormality with his deal etc. it would have been all over the newspapers. And we also had to try to get follow-ups and, you know, the songs that we were being presented with were pretty grim. The Eurovision thing didn’t carry him on into a career in the UK for him. Which was a shame. You see, Johnny wanted to be a rock star rather than a singer. And his appearance was sending out the wrong signals, in terms of what he was.
There must have been a lot of bitterness about that Logan business, because here was a guy who was on the brink of something huge, the platform was there and his career was now put in jeopardy….

It was chaos. We were away in Europe and we were able to get on with the job. Then we came back into this wall of bad feeling that was going on over here across managers, across people with songs, across other record labels etc. It was just uncomfortable. However, it was also very exhilarating. It was an amazing year. Again, it had great fun moments. Not many! (laughs).
It wasn’t long afterwards that you moved to RCA.

It kind of downhill with Spider after all that. The investment into the pop records wasn’t paying off. We weren’t selling records. Red Hurley wasn’t selling records. Sandie Jones wasn’t. They were being played off the air, but we weren’t cutting the mustard with the audiences. So I ended up out of Spider. I’d no income, so I thought I’d give it a go with management. So I started managing Eamon Carr’s band, Zen Alligators to see if we could get Eamon Carr and Johnny Fean etc. up and running. It was a terrible uphill battle – a great band, but just the wrong time. Then between one thing and another I got a phonecall saying that Don Ellis at RCA, who had a distribution deal here, wanted to set up a stand-alone company. So I met them at the Gresham and they had heard what I had done with Spider – and would I be interested.
Where were RCA based at the time?

The deal was that I would go in with RCA and they’d give me an office. So I ran that for about three years, up with what was then CBS in Cork Street – and then Don Ellis was moving in the UK from RCA to MCA, so he rang me and made me an offer I couldn’t understand and I said I’d go with him.
Let’s go back to the building up on Cork Street. Tell us about the window.

Well, I was always terrified up there. It was the worst building I was ever in in my life. It was full of vinyl records. It was a ramshackle, wooden interior. Everything in the building was wood – the office that we had was like a wooden staircase, up to a wooden floor. The whole thing was a tinder box. And I thought if ever there was a fire, I would be snookered. Because the first thing that would go was the balcony outside. So I had my rope ladder there beside the window ready to go out that way in the event that there was a fire.
You never had to use it?

I never had to use it, no.
With MCA, you broke Nanci Griffith in Ireland.

Nanci’s album was produced by Tony Brown in Nashville. I listened to it and there were some gems of songs one in particular – ‘From A Distance’. It was what I’d call the ‘trigger track’. Every artists needs a trigger track, one track that captures people’s imagination and this was the one. But I tried and tried. I had singles made at least twice and then I was plugging it for maybe three months. But it didn’t really work. So I just persevered. I must have been six months on ‘From A Distance’, plugging it and plugging it. And Marty Whelan said to me one day, ‘You really believe in it so much, I’ll try it for a while’. So I had Larry and Marty playing it and the rest was history. Once it started to get some radio play it happend.
How many copies did that album sell?

Oh, 130, 140,000. Across three or four album she did about 350,000 sales. Tony Brown in Nashville produced that, he’s a wonderful producer. Tony used to be a piano player with Elvis at one stage. He runs Universal South now.
When you moved to Universal, you came in after Paul Keogh – that had been a controversial period in Universal.

I just decided when I came in that I would return all the phone calls and that was the difference. I think what we try to do here is have a workplace that is an enjoyable environment. I am not one to play head games, I just want to get on with things. What would you rate as the most significant success with Universal?

Well, Shania Twain was massive. And then I was so pleased that we were the first outside America to really recognise and break Eminem. We went about it in unusual ways. We plugged shops with Eminem. We went down to Temple Bar and Grafton Street and all these boutiques in the area and gave them a copy of the album which speeded the process up no end. We were way ahead of the UK in terms of percentages that we were doing here. So it’s only really this year that I’ve been able to get my head around doing more domestic releases. I think a huge boost for us was the No.1 with Bell X1. We couldn’t get anything on radio – and as soon as we had a No.1 we can’t get them off radio. And then I’m excited by Tommy Fleming and The Blizzards.
You’ve kind of got back into A&R in a way, haven’t you?

Yeah. There had been a couple of reality shows and they were easy enough to pick up on, but Irish audiences don’t hang around on acts like that. But I couldn’t just go out and sign four or five bands. It has to have a spread to it. So we’ve got Tommy Fleming, The Blizzards, and we’re completing an album with Brendan Balfe’s comedy stuff which is hilarious. And I want to sign Monto directly onto Universal – they are a great band.
Tommy Fleming is an Irish phenomenon who may well do business elsewhere, but The Blizzards would be one with real international potential.

You’re better off not thinking along those lines. Your best bet is to think, can I make this work in Ireland and can I break even here? If, then, I get anything from any of the other territories, that’s a bonus. But really, to go in thinking we’re gonna conquer the world with The Blizzards would not be very clever because an A&R guy in one of the labels is not necessarily gonna have full ownership with any act that’s signed over here. So there might be a feeling of, well, I’ll find something myself.
And how about getting Michael Beinhorn to do the production.

Well in fairness, it was between Justin Moffatt and Richie MacDonagh that all came in. And the wonderful thing is that Michael heard the demos that we were listening to and just fell in love with the band. And I think he loved them for all the reasons we did. Live, there’s an energy there. You just can’t buy that. If it works I will be thrilled, but if it doesn’t I won’t regret it, because I know everybody in the set-up has given it 100%. It’s nice to see that. No prima donnas, no egos to overcome. It’s all sheer, unadulterated hard work and effort.
So what do you think is the most important element in achieving success?

It has to be the music. It has to be what people want. You can’t put out things that people don’t want. They’ll vote with their feet.
At the same time there’s an awful lot of people who’ve made great records that haven’t sold jack shit and there’s a lot of people who, you know, who have fallen short for reasons you could probably identify and so it’s more than just the music.

To have ten great songs and a great album and then enough ammunition to have a second great album, that is the important ingredient. And, of course, how the band handle themselves, how they present themselves, how they get that connection with the audience is vital.
You talked about the possibility of doing something like The Blizzards or Tommy Fleming from here and not relying on the international label.…

I’d love to do it. I’ve done it before with ‘Riverdance’. When I couldn’t get anybody to take on ‘Riverdance’, I said, shag this, and I released it in the UK myself. We manufactured it from here. We pressed everything here. We exported it over to the UK and we sold about half a million copies. I set up a press, radio and TV team in the UK, got distribution and got it out into all the shops we needed to get it into. But it was slow and laborious. We had ’Riverdance’ on Top of the Pops on a number of occasions, but on two of the occasions, where we broke the rule, the record was actually coming back down the charts when we got it back on. Unheard of. I’ve never seen it before. Never seen it since.
There’s been a period of huge change in the industry, with people finally getting to grips with the whole issue of downloading… so what does the future hold?

Music has never been more popular than it is right now. It’s how people get their music that is determining where the industry goes. And if people keep taking music for free, which they were doing, it can only go one way. But thankfully now there are enough platforms up there.
Retail still has an important part to play – but how do you see it evolving?

I still love going into shops. I love the interaction with other people in the store. I wouldn’t be a nerd who would sit down and order everything on the Net. I think that’s a lonely old world. I prefer to be out there sharing it. This is a subjective answer. I like the idea of strolling down Grafton Street and maybe going into a shopping centre and buying a couple of things and then having a cup of coffee. But I think retail will change in the way we buy. I think there will be kiosks where you go in and burn your own album. Or you’ll just lob it onto your I-Pod in-store and buy them track by track. But retail will still be there.
So is the album – the big statement from an artist once every two or three years – under threat.

I don’t know. We released The Killers last week and it went in a No.1, the biggest No.1 of the year. And this isn’t a premier time to be selling albums. Snow Patrol this year was immense, fantastic sales. Keane, The Killers, The Scissor Sisters are knocking up big sales.
What about the accusation that major labels don’t know what’s happening on the street, that they’re not interested in great music?

I can only speak for Universal and whilst Universal is a major name, it’s made up of 23 satellite companies who are very much in touch with the ground and what’s going on. Each autonomous company like Island Records or Mercury Records or Polydor, they know exactly what’s going on out there. They’re working away on their own, under the umbrella of Universal, but they’re small companies each one of them. And on the basis of the results they’ve had this year, I would say that they very definitely know what’s going and what people want. We’re breaking acts right, left and centre. There were six Universal albums in the Top 10 of all new acts, break outs for this year, three American and three UK. They know what’s going on. We’re very lucky, as well, in that our chairman is music through and through. He’s not a lawyer, for him it’s about music. And what is great is that we’re all encouraged to get new music out there and break new acts.
You’ve been doing very well recently in terms of radio play. What do you put that down to?

Good music. It’s not all red hot acts. We’re getting plays for break-out acts as well. There’s maybe two or three tracks by The Feeling on the music control chart, two tracks by Orson, we started to get great radio play for James Morrison – the breadth of it is very, very wide. Scissor Sisters obviously helped. It’s an amazing radio track. As I say, The Feeling, they’re just fabulous radio tracks. But it takes a while to get those up and running.
What was the high point in your career?

There’s plenty to come. I think. ‘Riverdance’ the single, was a real high point. To do that from here, I was really, really please with that. But we have a high point here at least once every few weeks when something works.
Who do you think are the great managers in Ireland?

We’ve had loads of bands, loads of artists etc., but we’ve had five first-class managers that I can think of. For me, Paul McGuinness is top of the pile; Louis Walsh is at a different level – he’s a great positioner. And then after Louis there are three, I think, who have done a great job, first-class job for their artists. John Hughes did a great job for The Corrs, Nicky Ryan did a fantastic job for Enya and Facthna O’Kelly had to be in there with them for two acts – Boomtown Rats, Sinead O’Connor. He’s just great. I’d love to see Fachtna more involved in more mainstream things.
You were close to Ossie Kilkenny over the years.

Oh yeah, yeah. The man. You wouldn’t want anybody else in your corner. I don’t know a fraction of what he does, to be honest with you. He’s just one of the brightest people in relation to the industry that I know of. I have unbelievable admiration for his willingness to do things for others. It’s quite phenomenal – look at the Special Olympics, what he did there is frightening. What he does for the Sports Council is phenomenal. So there is a fantastic willingness on the part of OJ to do things for other people.
Who’s the worst golfer you’ve played with in the industry?

Myself and that is an answer you can construe any way you want! Absolutely myself. I’m the worst golfer I know.
And who’s the one who is the most committed to winning?

John Sheehan. John is a fantastic golfer and if I had half the skill, a quarter of the skill, a tenth of the skill that John Sheehan has, I would be very pleased with my game. John’s a real winner.
You must have known Eddie Jordan well, did you?

Well, Eddie used to play in a band. But my pal Ed Large is Eddie’s brother-in-law, so that kind of rekindled the friendship. Eddie loves music and loves gigs – he was the most generous host at the races, great fun. He’s a rogue. He’s just great to be out with. He loves life, which I think is what attracts me to people. The people that I would hang around with are all of the same ilk – let’s be doing things. Let’s not be sitting around worrying or thinking what’s going to happen next, whatever. You’re only here for a short time on the planet. Let’s get out and have the crack. The worst thing that ever happened to Formula One was the demise of Irvine and Jordan on the track. They were the ones that lit it up.
Is there still that fun element in the music?

I think we’re terribly lucky now. We’re in a great business. There’s a lot of fun to be derived from it. Sure, there’s headaches and heartaches. But I think I’ve been lucky insofar as I am able to say that my job is my hobby and I don’t know of too many people who can say that. But there would be a very rare day I would waken up and say, ‘Shit, I have to go into the office’. It would be a very rare day.